In Recovery...

In November we're doing T-SQL Tuesday a week early (Tuesday November 2nd) so that it doesn't clash with PASS and I'll be your host!

What is T-SQL Tuesday?

If you haven't seen it yet, T-SQL Tuesday is the brain-child of fellow-MVP Adam Machanic (blog|twitter). It happens once a month on the 2nd Tuesday (different this month) and is hosted by a different person in the SQL community each time. The idea is that it's kind of a rallying point to get a bunch of people to blog about a particular topic on the same day, giving a wide and varied set of opinions and interpretations of that month's topic. The hoster then posts a wrap-up commenting on all the contributions. I think it's a great idea and I contribute whenever I have time.

What is the topic for November?

This month I'd like to step back from the deep technical stuff and ask "why are DBA skills necessary?"

I don't want to color people's opinions by giving my own yet, but some things to consider are:

What problems have you seen in your career that could have been avoided with some DBA skills?

At what point does a SQL Server installation need a real DBA to look after it?

How could DBA input help prevent design problems in data applications?

Should there be cross-over been developer skills and DBA skills? What about architects? Storage admins?

How can business continuity be affected by lack of DBA skills?

How much can we rely on auto-tuning to ensure performant work loads?

Is Microsoft doing enough to foster DBA skills as a point of excellence?

What about on other RDBMS platforms? What about no-SQL?

I could go on for hours… I'm really looking forward to seeing where you take this topic and I'm expecting some great posts.

What are the rules?

As with any organized event, there are inevitably some rules that help make things run smoothly.

NOTE: THIS DOES NOT DO A 'TRACKBACK' – YOU WILL NEED TO ADD A LINK IN A COMMENT ON THIS POST.

It would also be really nice if you…

Include a reference to T-SQL Tuesday in the title of your post. (The more we bloggers advertise T-SQL Tuesday, the more we bloggers get T-SQL tuesday readers)

Tweet using the hash tag #TSQL2sDay to follow links and other relevant conversations.

Consider hosting T-SQL Tuesday yourself. If you’re interested let Adam Machanic Know. If you’ve participated in two T-SQL Tuesdays previously and you don’t let your blog go stale (blog once a month for the last six months) then he’ll put you in the rotation.

Summary

Don't fret about the rules, it's nothing too complex. If you're having trouble linking properly on the day, drop me an email (paul@SQLskills.com) or tweet (@PaulRandal) and I'll help you out – I'll be watching things all day.

As I said, I'm really looking forward to seeing a really diverse set of posts and I'll very quickly post a long summary with lots of editorial commentary and opinions too.

Excellent topic choice for Novembers T-SQL Tuesday. Should be lots of information for people to digest about why people think DBA’s skills are important. More importantly it would be interesting to see why people/company’s feel they don’t need DBA skills to support thier applications.